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While most importantly, Memorial Day weekend is a time to remember and thank those who have served and made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, it is also the official start to the summer movie season. I love summer movies. To make a generalization, these movies tend to be action packed and don’t usually require a lot of brain power on my part. I can just sit back and enjoy the over-dramatic explosions. I haven’t mentioned yet that I love movies that are typically geared toward men. When the first Star Trek movie (the most recent re-boot) came out I was living in King of Prussia and had yet to make a group of movie going friends. I love my girls out there, but they weren’t always into going to action movies with me. So I went by myself to an early Sunday matinee on opening weekend. I was literally the only woman in the theater. Seriously. You should have seen the looks I was given, the guys in that IMAX theater were so confused.

There are a lot of movies coming out this summer, you can get a full list here if you are interested. These are the ones I’m most looking forward to.

Star Trek Into Darkness

I know this is already out, but I haven’t seen it yet and I am super excited to go. I tend to avoid these movies on opening week, so I may go and see it this coming week. It brings back Pittsburgh native Zachary Quinto as Spock and Chris Pine as Kirk. The bad guy in this one is Benedict Cumberbatch (I love saying his name, it’s a fantastic British name). You may know him from the BBC series Sherlock. It’s a great show that airs in the US on PBS if you haven’t watched it yet!

Man of Steel (June 14)

Yea!! A new Superman movie. I honestly don’t know a ton about this movie, but Zach Snyder is the Director and he brought us 300 and Watchmen, both of which I really liked, so my expectations are high. My best friend is getting married the weekend this comes out. The groom mentioned hitting this up at some point, I’m totally in (kidding Marissa :-)) So I’ll see it the week after!

Monsters University (June 21)

Yes, it’s a kids movie, but I’m rather excited about this one. I loved Monsters Inc and I do love Disney. I can’t wait to see how Mike and Sulley met and came to be the team we met in the first movie!

The Lone Ranger (July 3)

I’ve come to the conclusion that Johnny Depp only knows how to play long haired characters with accents these days. He is American, just in case you forgot. Armie Hammer plays the ranger and I really liked him in J Edgar and in Mirror Mirror (he was a funny bright spot in a movie that was just “eh” overall). This just looks like a fun adventure flick that is perfect for summer movie watching. This is the kind of movie that would be fun to see at a drive in if there were still more than 1 or 2 in the southwest PA area.

The Wolverine (July 26)

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine again, I’m in. I just love watching these movies. One of the funniest stories about my workplace was the day I was walking behind a group of engineers, these were guys about my age (mid to late 20’s at the time). They were having a dead serious conversation about which X-Men Character they would be if they were X-Men. I looked at my friend and pointed out that this was the reason I didn’t date people we worked with. But honestly, my answer was Storm. I’d totally be Storm.

Elysium (August 9)

I honestly haven’t seen a ton about this first, but, being a Sci-fi movie, it’s right up my alley. Set in the year 2154, where the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth, a man (Matt Damon) takes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarized worlds. That’s the stock description, it could be a good action movie, or really bad, we will have to wait to see!

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (August 23)

This movie is based on a book series that I really liked. A lot. Yes, it’s a young adult book series, don’t judge me. I’m very worried about being disappointed in how this turns out though. As I recently learned from the movie version of another YA book that I loved, Beautiful Creatures, these books don’t always make the transition to the silver screen like Hunger Games or Twilight did. I have hopes that this will be okay, but with a late summer premier, Sony Pictures is not exactly saying that they have faith in this one, so don’t hold your breath that the other 2 books in the series will be made into movies.

The World’s End

5 Friends trying to complete an epic pub crawl encounter more issues than being too drunk to walk and may end up being humankind’s saviors. This stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I love these two together, their chemistry is great. And I love British Comedy. So this seems like a good way to end the summer.

After all of these movies we’ll enter into Oscar territory for the most part. The movies released for the rest of the year will generally fall into one of three categories. Oscar contender, holiday crowd movie or horror. I usually skip the horror movies, I don’t like being scared all that much. I will see a lot of the other two types though. But a lot of those tend to be very serious, so I’ll take my easy summer movies while I can get them.